“… very little carbon is absorbed [by tree planting] in the early years. In fact, it will take 50 years for the carbon from this one [plane] trip to be taken up by the trees. The 20-year-old [flyer] will be 70 by the time the trip is fully ‘paid’ for in carbon terms. “
The crusade against carbon dioxide (CO2) has many here-and-now costs. And CO2 mitigation is futile given energy density in favor of oil, natural gas, and coal -and intermittency against wind, solar, even hydropower.
Carbon offsets are a tool in the mitigation toolbox. Corporations like it, but environmentalists fuss about business-as-usual emissions and “greenwashing.” Bottom line: planting somewhere to allow CO2 emissions is iffy. What about the accounting where the trade is a dud? What if the tree gets sick?…
Continue Reading“… breathe easy. Atmospheric CO2 is not causing, nor will it ever cause, and direct threat to your health or cognitive performance.”
Almost all trace elements and compounds, even beneficial ones, can be poisonous if ingested or inhaled in large enough concentrations. So, what about carbon dioxide (CO2)? Do we have to worry about any deleterious health effects as its atmospheric concentration continues to climb?
As an answer to the above questions, consider the work of the following four research teams, two of which focused on human physiological responses to elevated levels of CO2 and two of which focused on human cognitive responses.
Liu et al. (2017)
Liu et al. (2017) examined the performance, acute health symptoms and physiological responses of human subjects exposed to both ambient (403 ppm) and elevated (3025 ppm) atmospheric CO2.…
Continue Reading“… communications between different regulatory agencies as the event approached were inadequate. Transparency regarding the location of natural gas supply infrastructure was atrocious.”
“Currently Texas is #1 in the nation in terms of existing wind capacity. It is also #1 in terms of planned capacity additions for wind and solar, and #2 in the nation for planned battery capacity additions. However, there is little-to-no planned capacity addition for other forms of dispatchable generation. This could become an issue for reliability.” (Baker Institute, study, below)
There is not only government failure in the quest to address market failure. There is analytic failure in identifying market failure that government is empowered to correct. Restated, problems attributed to markets are often the result of prior government intervention on close inspection.
This is true with some classic examples in the energy field, from the origins of public utility regulation of electricity to oil overproduction under the ‘rule of capture’, stories for another day.…
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